Shocked! Shocked I tell you! Could not have seen that coming, nope not even for one second.
Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
101–110 of 371 posts
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#102My default reaction to the introduction of any age-verification for any service is the closing account. Goodbye Discord, account closed out of protest. The second option is ignoring the verification request. Goodbye online-gaming-with-strangers on Xbox. (I see this as a positive). Same goes for Ubisoft who aggressively wanted my secret papers to verify my identity. I've yet to come across anything I want or need outs…
What's wrong with being flagged a non-adult? Being a non-adult means you are limited to supervised child-safe spaces. Child-safe doesn't mean "no adults" allowed. It means "monitored and censored"
Well, ad are supposed to be different for children, right? So in theory we would get less ads by being ID'd as a child. Now, this would probably cause a new law where they would allow child ads...
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#103Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world? You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and acc…
> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai
The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.
USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can openly (and legally) debate these things, and if we convince enough people, then we can change them.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#104The fact that these tools are 'active' centric, i.e : You must perform an action to validate you're NOT a child, these will never protect children. A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people. I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have…
Age verification doesn't stop determined bad actors, it just builds a database of everyone who cooperated...........
Now do Covid… tracking the non-compliant is surely the smaller task.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#105Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world? You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and acc…
> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai. USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can…
Active public discourse seems to have not made even a slight dent in the growth of surveillance in the last 25 years.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai. USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can…
Active public discourse seems to have not made even a slight dent in the growth of surveillance in the last 25 years.
Wild exaggeration.
Here's an example just recently:
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/flock-contracts...
It's a constant and ongoing public concern.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#107Age verification inherently requires identity verification. The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.
How do you prevent selling those ID codes to kids?
The same way you prevented adults buying pornography for kids prior to the web, and the way you prevent adults from buying beer for kids now.
Namely, you don't prevent it (I was 11 when I first saw hardcore pornography, on a VHS tape, at a sleepover party), but it does place a (surmountable) barrier in the way, which will reduce access to some degree. The degree to which that happens depends on a lot of things that are hard to predict. We have culturally normalized access to a lot of things for children, and reversing that will likely take more than just changes to a law.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#108Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world? You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and acc…
> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai. USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can…
Somehow we have more public “discourse” than ever with less public “debate” than ever. People just yelling rude names at each other and repeating nonsense talking points, while the trajectory of what’s actually happening continues to worsen. I include Congress and the executive branch in this characterization.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't the act of notifying >16 today and >18 tomorrow leak birthdates?
which is nothing in comparison to leaking all of personal information you can also introduce some jitter like changing age range only once a week/month/year for everyone
Birthday, zip code and gender is enough to uniquely identify most Americans.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Complacency. The west had a golden age from the fall of the Soviet Union, removing their main rival. It also reinforced its reinforced its belief in the inevitably of progress (the "end of history" nonsense, for example). They cannot now cope with threats or danger. That said, comparing the west to Russia, China etc. is a gross exaggeration.
China has much lower crime, cheaper healthcare and is making progress in other aspects. We’re rapidly regressing into prideful ignorance. People are being encouraged to drink raw milk and fear vaccines. 19 century illnesses are making a resurgence. Citizens are being indefinitely detained for “looking” like immigrants.
China is also an ancient civilization. Americans view of themselves is highly inflated by the sheer luck of being two oceans away from everyone during both world wars. Save for Pearl Harbor there were no notable attacks on the American homeland. It's a lot easier to be a superpower when the world destroys itself and you step into the breach. Millions of Soviet civilians died on their own homeland. In their own cities. Millions. Most Americans have no idea and can't really comprehend it. Even today a shocking number of Americans don't have a passport and really know nothing about the world beyond their shores. These people are overrepresented in an American Congress that is anti-democratic. People on the coasts, like in New York City are underrepresented in American government. The entire state of New York gets the same amount of senators as flyover states, many of which are welfare states (take more funds than they contribute). This is because in a modern economy what NYC produces is more valuable than what a state with barely any people in the middle of nowhere produces. Yet the middle of nowhere is represented more. It makes no sense.
The current administration is only convincing the world that America is a threat. We live in an age where two oceans offer far less protection than they did when America rose to superpower status. The fact Russian intelligence operatives can so easily infiltrate American political discourse is just one example. Watch any congressional hearing about cyber and you might be forgiven for thinking we have already been invaded. Beating up on third world pariah states impresses no one but the current administration. The United States bombs Iran but blinks at Russia. The administration started a trade war with China then backed off, not one meaningful concession was achieved.
Unless America reverses course fast the decline will only continue. The world will move on. No country is inevitable.